[Zope-dev] Re: paver and buildout

[Martijn Faassen]

Hey,

Kevin Dangoor wrote:
> So, I saw Martijn's "paver: buildout is utterly doomed" message on 
> Tuesday, but I haven't had a chance to respond to it until now.

I knew you'd find out. :)

> As Kent points out immediately following, I plan to use zc.buildout's 
> machinery. I actively use zc.buildout now, and I'm looking forward to 
> getting my buildout merged into my pavement.py.

Yes, I hadn't seen this until after I wrote that message. I'm glad to 
hear so! There are packaging and distribution problems that both 
projects share too, and I hope eventually some solutions to these 
problems can go into setuptools. If you're interested in hearing more 
about the problems we've been experiencing I'd be happy to talk about 
this more.

> I totally agree with Martijn that buildout needs a better website and 
> I'm glad to see that Baiju is going forward with that.
> 
> Ultimately, though, I think that people will choose to use buildout 
> alone or paver+buildout (or maybe paver+virtualenv, depending on their 
> tastes) completely based on what fits their brains better.

While I fully agree that's an important factor, presentation counts too. 
Zope's attention to good presentation has been, let's say, lacking. I 
was rather empathic, deliberately.

> I emailed a fair bit with Zed Shaw about his Vellum tool. He adamantly 
> opposes having his builds defined in a full-blown language (ie Python), 
> whereas for my needs I really want to define my builds in Python. But I 
> want it to be easier to do than what you get with the Python standard 
> library.
> 
> People who prefer to keep there build information in a "data" format 
> will no doubt stick with buildout. I have no problem with that. My goal 
> is just to share the workload with other people who have similar build 
> and deployment problems to the ones I have.

I can certainly see benefits to both approaches, and I think there's 
enough room to support both. But I think better presentation and 
speaking to Python programmers matters so much I think zc.buildout 
stands rather weakly in competition with Paver right now. This needs to 
be improved.

What I like about buildout's recipe approach is that it creates an 
ecosystem of reusable recipes, and gets people to think about 
declarative ways to get things done. If you could've gotten your problem 
solved by writing 5 lines of python, the recipe might not be around. On 
the other hand, the benefit is that you'd be done after 5 lines of 
Python. :)

I believe I read somewhere about Paver having a goal to have projects 
install directly from PyPI (with a single command), is that correct? 
That would be interesting.

Regards,

Martijn